Daily Network Monitor

I recently uncovered a cool post on VoIP Lowdown.

VoIP technology has the tech geeks buzzing. It has been touted as:

- the killer of telecoms
- a solution for the third world’s communication gap
- revolutionizing factor in international business

But despite all the buzz, and the predictions that everyone will be it using it by 2009, why does it seem that every time you make a phone call with Skype the quality stinks…or that your Vonage calls constantly get dropped…or worse, that teenage hackers are stealing your personal information and bringing down the whole network?

A VoIP network is susceptible to the usual attacks that plague all data networks:

…viruses, spam, phishing, hacking attempts, intrusions, mismanaged identities, Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, lost and stolen data, voice injections, data sniffing, hijacked calls, toll fraud, eavesdropping, and on and on and on.

The only difference is, with other technologies people take basic steps to protect themselves. With VoIP, nobody is doing so. As a result, all we hear about in the mainstream media is how vulnerable and unreliable VoIP is. And let’s face it…until people start taking the steps to safeguard their networks, this technology isn’t going to go places.

So for those you geeks who want to see the technology get broadly adopted, (and maybe fulfill some of the lofty aspirations mentioned above) start by first protecting your own VoIP network, and then helping to protect those of your friends and neighbors. Pretty soon, we can dump the “vulnerable” label and start gaining some non-techie fans.

You can read the 25 ways here.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 11th, 2006 at 9:12 am and is filed under Network Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.